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The Warriors’ Stephen Curry is the best thing about the NBA playoffs, but that’s not news to Toronto fans. We’ve known him forever as The Player We Wish DeMar DeRozan Was.

Golden State's Stephen Curry, right, passes the ball around San Antonio's Tony Parker during Game 4 of their Western Conference playoff series on Sunday. The Warriors won 97-87 in overtime.
(ROBERT GALBRAITH / REUTERS)

These are the playoffs of the understudy. Watching Golden State’s Festus Ezeli notch major minutes Sunday in what he apparently believed was a game of Red Rover was visual confirmation that this is only fun to watch when it’s played by people who know how.

This is where Curry has been a salve.

The less important thing I decided on my own Sunday is that I can’t suffer through any more of Will.I.Am’s “That Power” NBA promos. It was OK in small, mutable doses. But that promo asked to spend the night sleeping on the couch in my subconscious, and now it won’t leave.

If I’m forced to endure any more of that guy nodding along to his own song like a pigeon with a leather fetish, I may rip my flatscreen off the wall (“No, no, don’t worry, sweetheart. I’d never do that. What? I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to the TV.”)

(Taking a moment.) Back to basketball.

One good reason to love Curry is that he isn’t in that promo. They were taped before the playoffs started. Neither Curry nor his Golden State teammates rated. Dwight Howard? Oh yeah, he’s all over them. That’s called “justice.”

Fast-forward four weeks. Curry’s a star now. Up in Toronto, we can say we appreciated him before the hipsters came round. We’ve known him forever as The Player We Wish DeMar DeRozan Was.

Put nuance aside for a minute — the game’s prime attraction is watching a guy put the ball through the hoop from distance. That’s the pictogram for “basketball” you’d show alien life forms.

At the moment, Curry may be the game’s best pure shooter. He’s certainly the most fun to watch.

He was a game-time decision on Sunday, after spraining his left ankle for the second time in the post-season. He moved at half-speed throughout, but still managed 39 minutes. The rule is that your shot starts from the ground and works up from there. Curry is working the quantum into that physics.

He has a gyroscope where other people have a medulla oblongata. He is incapable of being off-balance. His feet and shoulders are always square to the hoop as he shoots. The quickness of his release makes other players — good shooters, even — look as if they’re launching boulders out of catapults.

They were down by eight to San Antonio at the half, shooting 30 per cent from the field, having committed 12 turnovers. They didn’t need entertainers at the intermission in Oakland. They needed gravediggers.

Curry came out and sank two quick threes to get the listless crowd back into it (there is clearly no overlap in that city between Warriors and Raiders fans). He was 5-for-10 from three-point range, though his highlight was a desperate, wrong-handed scoop shot over Tim Duncan.

It went to overtime, where Golden State ran roughshod. Spurs coach Gregg Popovich was very even-handed throughout with his stinkeye. He knows that what the vultures have waited years for is now happening — his aging core is slowing down. In the extra period, Duncan, Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker (nursing a sore calf) looked as if they were resting for Game 5. You can’t rest with this Warriors team. They are a daycare, hopped up on Pop Rocks and Coke, and released into the schoolyard.

Afterward, Curry was asked how he was able to play on the multiply sprained hinge.

“My faith in God. And the great training staff.”

Not in that order.

While it is wrong to root against a team as classy as the Spurs, it’s also impossible not to pull for the Warriors. They are the Raptors if things had gone right. And they are proof that with a little draft luck (Curry, seventh pick in ’97; Klay Thompson, 11th pick in ’11; Harrison Barnes, seventh pick in ’12), anything’s possible.

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